TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
FOREWORD
1. LAST WRONGS
2. WELCOME TO HECK, POPULATION: YOU
3. IN BEA’S HIVE
4. LAIR OF THE LIAR
5. THE NOT-SO-GREAT ESCAPE
6. AN UNHAPPY MEAL WITH A SIDE OF FUZZ
7. UNTOGETHER FOREVER
8. CURS AND WEIGH
9. OUT OF FASHION
10. YOU ARE UTTERLY ALONE
11. CLASS CUTUP
12. FIRST-CLASS FRIGHT
13. SCENT UP THE RIVER
14. SCIENCE FRICTION
15. A LUCKY BREAK
16. HATCHET JOB
17. CAGEY CRITTER
18. FLEE THIS CIRCUS
MIDDLEWORD
19. THICKER THAN WATER
20. TUNNEL OF DUNG
21. SUGAR, SPICE, AND EVERYTHING MEAN
22. THE FLUSH OF YOUTH
23. FROM MALL RATS TO SEWER RATS
24. PIPE DREAM COME TRUE
25. WAIT WATCHERS
26. ALWAYS WINTER, NEVER CHRISTMAS
27. TO HECK IN A HANDBASKET
28. UNJUST DESSERTS
29. YO-HO-HO AND A BUCKET OF SPIT
30. TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL
31. LIVER LET DIE
32. GIRLS AND PLOYS
33. SWEET DREAMS AREN’T MADE OF THIS
34. IF YOU SNOOZE, YOU LOSE
35. DREAM SCHEME
36. MOON RIVER
37. BOOGEY BOGEY
38. SOUL SEARCHING
39. A STITCH JUST IN TIME
40. A GATE WITH DESTINY
41. GOOSE PIMPLES
42. THE BUBB STOPS HERE
43. BODY SLAM
44. A NEW LEASE ON DEATH
BACKWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RAPACIA
COPYRIGHT
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY SON, OGDEN,
WHO MADE MY BELIEF IN THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE
FOREWORD
As many believe, there is a place above and a place below. But there are also places in between. Some not quite awfully perfect and others not quite perfectly awful.
Building infinite eternities is a costly endeavor, even for the Galactic Order Department. That’s why the Powers That Be (and any of its associated or subsidiary enterprises, including—but not limited to—the Powers That Be Evil) have to be resourceful, stitching together spaces between spaces, places between places.
They are all around you and go by many names. Some feel like eternity. And some of them actually are eternity…at least for a little while…
1 · LAST WRONGS
IN GENERICA, KANSAS, Christmas wasn’t something you felt in the chill of the winter air or the warmth of a generous smile. It was announced by the sixteen-foot tower of crystal angels at Grizzly Mall—the Mall of Generica.
And this year was no different—at first. Exhausted shoppers filed by, momentarily entranced by the shimmering, heart-faced, bare-bottomed cupids. That is, until Marlo Fauster smashed them to bits with the oar she’d stolen from Spoiled Sports Sporting Goods.
“Let’s go!” shrieked Marlo, a blue-haired, thirteen-going-on-thirty-year-old girl, to her gangly younger brother, Milton. Shards of shining wings and harps rained down around them.
The two children bounded across the showroom floor, Marlo running with a look of fierce determination and Milton running out of pure fear. Unbeknownst to both of them, they were also running out of time.
Milton had spent most of his young life avoiding trouble: staring at his shoes, shuffling along unnoticed, ducking away from tense—or even remotely interesting—situations for fear of their potentially dangerous potential. He only felt truly safe when tucked between the covers of a book, experiencing life secondhand.
Marlo, however, was a different story.
Too far was where Marlo lived. If something didn’t involve petty (and not-so-petty) crime, it just wasn’t worth doing.
Maybe it was all just a cry for attention. Unfortunately, Marlo’s latest acts of thievery and vandalism were drawing far too much attention. At least that’s how Milton saw it through his thick, Coke-bottle glasses as his sister dragged him toward his untimely demise.
They ran past stunned shoppers into the mall concourse, Marlo waving her oar as if rowing furiously through a human sea. Milton fought to keep up.
“That should buy us some time from security!” Marlo squealed with manic glee. It was at times like this, Milton thought, that he was in the presence of—and grudgingly related to—a new kind of evil.
“And you should have bought that stupid oar!” Milton replied, panting.
“Why would I buy an oar?” she asked, giving Milton’s arm a sadistic twist. “We live in Kansas, short bus.”
The two siblings darted around a corner and burst into the Grizzly Mall food court.
“Then why…?” Milton stammered in front of Tongue Thaied.
“For the sport of it,” Marlo said with pride. “If I pull this off—the most conspicuous holiday heist in Grizzly Mall history—I’ll be a modern-day Kleptopatra.” She paused dramatically, her dark eyes twinkling with reflected Christmas lights. “The stuff of shoplifting legend. And all that expensive makeup is just icing on the cake.”
Milton stared at the pink Goodbye Puppy bag underneath his arm as he trotted onward.
“So all this makeup…you didn’t need me to just hold it for you back at the cosmetics counter…I…I just stole…lip gloss?”
“And Suburban Blight cheek bronzer with free-radical scavengers and lipid-rich amino moisturizers,” Marlo said while descending an ascending escalator. She grinned. “Welcome to the life, my gullible little apprentice. You are but putty in my skillful hands.”
Behind them, a full-bodied mall security guard lumbered in hot pursuit. Another chunky-style defender of mall law soon joined him, slurping down a smoothie.
Milton looked behind him. Despite their weight being nearly double their IQ, the guards were closing in.
“I can’t believe you tricked me into stealing for you!” Milton barked in his squeaky, just-turned-eleven voice.
Marlo snickered. The fact that she could run clad in several layers of black thrift-store dresses, holding an eight-foot oar, and still manage to maintain a superior attitude was impressive.
“You might get all the A’s in the family, but I certainly aced you,” she snorted, her black lips catching on a fang.
Milton and Marlo rushed into the mall’s massive atrium, joining a crowd gathered around a white, globby sculpture. A fierce marshmallow bear, frozen in mid-attack, loomed over the horde of gawking Genericans. Below the twenty-foot-tall sugary bruin was a banner declaring “Welcome to Grizzly Mall: Home of the State’s Second-Largest Bear-Themed Marshmallow Statue!”
Marlo’s oar sliced through the mass of shoppers like a thin, wooden shark fin.
“Try to blend,” she whispered to her trembling brother.
Milton squished the pink bag of lipstick, fruit-scented creams, and vials of pricey gosh-knows-whats under his armpit. Despite the heat radiating from the mob, Milton shivered. Something—or someone—was near, something so cold that it robbed the heat from his very bones. He squinted through his thick glasses and noticed a dark smudge. He wiped his lenses, but the stubborn smudge was still there, hovering on the edge of the crowd that filled the atrium. The dark smudge was a boy.
A hulking boy. A cruel boy. A boy all too familiar to Milton. A boy who, in many ways, resembled a smudge. A boy whose eyes were dull, dark, wicked slits. A boy whose skin was like puffy, freckled dough that gave off a sickly sweet smell like rotting fruit. A boy named Damian.
Damian sneered at Milton and ran his grubby finger across his throat as he lurched from the mall commons into the heart of the mall. Milton gulped and shut his eyes. On the insides of his eyelids, however, he replayed scenes of Damian’s notorious cruelty, all of which—unfortunately—starred Milton.
Scene One: The boys’ locker room just after gym class. Damian, clad in stained, crunchy underwear, flicks a towel at Milton. It slices through the air like a terry-cloth snake, hissing and snapping, stinging Milton’s scrawny body.
Scene Two: The school hallway. Milton runs, wheezing. Damian rushes up behind him. He thrusts his hands deep into Milton’s baggy corduroys and emerges with Milton’s Stargate: Atlantis underwear. He yanks them up to Milton’s neck. The pain is enough to postpone puberty for a year.
Scene Three: Mid-Kansas Junior Science Championship. Milton stands proud by his science project: a generator powered by two ferrets on twin wheels. Milton’s braces gleam as he smiles for the teacher’s camera. A flashbulb goes off. His project explodes. Bits of burning metal fly into the air. Children shriek. Singed ferrets shriek. Damian shrieks with laughter as he stuffs several fat firecrackers back into the pocket of his filthy jeans.
Milton opened his eyes. What upset Milton wasn’t necessarily that Damian was here in Grizzly Mall. It was that he actually looked guilty. It was a look Milton had never seen on the front of Damian’s great, lumpy head before. What this meant to Milton was that Damian was up to something that scared even him, something unequaled in his reign of thuggery. The thought made Milton’s head hurt.
“Oww!” he yelped as Marlo whacked him in the back of his head with her stolen oar.
“Wake up, runt. We’ve got company.”
A fresh quartet of security guards lurched out of the food court, sloshing Huge Gulps and munching curly fries, to aid their winded comrades. One of them jabbed a fry toward Milton and Marlo. The guards broke into pairs and approached the shoplifting duo from either side.
In the blink of her eye, Marlo seized Milton by the arm and dragged him into the center of the crowd.
“W-what the…?” Milton stammered.
“I’ve got it under control,” she replied.
“I’m doomed…,” Milton mumbled under his breath.
Marlo stopped just in front of the marshmallow bear and shoved the oar under her brother’s neck.
“Don’t come any closer!” she shouted, her nostrils flaring. “I mean it!”
The crowd froze. The plump security guards, however, continued their approach.
Marlo grabbed a small pot of sickly blue makeup from the stolen cosmetics bag and held it up to Milton’s clammy, pale face. “So help me, I will apply this eye shadow that so clearly doesn’t complement his complexion!”
Milton’s pet ferret, Lucky, chose this moment to pop his fuzzy white head out of Milton’s backpack, where he often hid, fell asleep, and awakened in strange new places. Lucky considered the crowd with his bright pink eyes and gave his opinion of the situation with a dry hiss.
The crowd backed away as one, like a giant creature with a hundred heads. Even the security guards stopped insecurely in their tracks. Everyone was taken aback by the sudden, inexplicable appearance of the twitchy white weasel-like animal—except for the Fausters, who were unaware that they were harboring a stowaway.
“Wow,” Marlo whispered as she scanned the scene with awe. “I had no idea how style conscious our town was.”
Milton heard a faint sizzling sound coming from behind the bear. Curious, he turned his head—as much as he could with an oar wedged beneath his neck—and saw Damian smirking from the balcony, just above the bear. Milton followed Damian’s gaze down toward a thin plume of smoke snaking out of the bear’s white glob of a tail.
Damian had lodged a stick of dynamite in a place no real grizzly would tolerate. The violated sculpture gave off the smell of a roasting s’more.
Milton’s eyes bugged out. He broke free of his sister’s clutches and ran.
“Hey!” Marlo tried to chase after her brother. Unfortunately, the hem of her dress stuck fast to the marshmallow grizzly’s gummy paw. She pulled at claw-like strings of gooey taffy but couldn’t get away. Milton looked back and saw his sister struggling.
“Leave the dress!” he shouted.
“Are you kidding?” Marlo sneered. “This is vintage. One of a kind.”
Milton ran back and tugged her sleeve. “C’mon! The bear’s gonna blow!”
Marlo’s face looked like a bowl of sour milk with makeup. “I’d sooner die than leave this—”
The sputtering fuse disappeared into the bear’s bottom and the massive marshmallow monument exploded. Grown men screamed. Women wept. Marlo and Milton, hand in hand, were instantly engulfed in flaming goo.
Smoke, noise, and burning marshmallow fused together to create a sickeningly sweet moment, one that was both ridiculously tragic and tragically ridiculous. It was a moment that Generica would talk about for years to come. Yet for Marlo and Milton, it was the last moment that they would ever share. On earth, anyway.
2 · WELCOME TO HECK, POPULATION: YOU
MILTON FELT LIKE someone had ripped a full-body Band-Aid off him, one that covered both sides of his skin, outside and in. Sure, you’d expect a fiery end at least to sting, but this sensation didn’t exactly feel “physical.” It made Milton feel like a weird echo of himself.
Milton had—at first—felt as if he was floating upward through clouds of fragrant mist, accompanied by a choir of angelic voices and the gorgeous swipes of a harp, with his sister uncharacteristically mute and still by his side. The sights and sounds were heavenly—like paradise—until Milton sensed a hesitation, a peculiar scrutiny. It was kind of like when he went to the dentist and they had to take X-rays. The assistant with her big lead apron aimed the gun-thing at your “full of bitter cardboard” cheek, then went away to flick on a secret switch. You didn’t exactly feel the X-rays, but you kind of did. You knew that you were being analyzed in a deep way, like a thousand microscopic eyes were sifting through your every cell.
After that initial invasive tingle, there was the briefest of pauses. But then his ascension screeched to a jolting halt, like someone (or something) had changed his/her/its mind. Snippets of a conversation streamed into his head, as if he were a radio tuning into a faraway frequency.
“No…wait…him… perfect for the job…” After this snap judgment snapped, Milton pitched abruptly downward, due south, at a jillion miles an hour.
Marlo and Milton shrieked as they tumbled down a coiled slide enveloped in clouds of vapor. They glided for miles—thousands of miles, actually—screeching, their terrified faces still spotted with blobs of smoldering marshmallow.
With each twist of the slide, the white clouds of mist gradually darkened, at first to an ash gray, then finally a sooty black. The divine chorus of angelic harmonies grew fainter. In its place was the sound of mocking laughter.
After what seemed like hours but was actually no time whatsoever, since time holds no dominion over this particular place (though the Time Institute of Chronometry, Tabulation, and Order Know-how—TIC-TOK—is making significant advances by the minute), they landed, whimpering, in a semi-deflated, Olympic-sized kiddie pool full of red Ping-Pong balls and rotting garbage.
Marlo rose unsteadily and wiped fresh trails of mascara tears off her pale cheeks. Milton moaned and straightened his glasses. One of the lenses was broken. He squinted out of the good lens, looking like a runtish, well-read Cyclops.
They cautiously stepped out of the garbage pool into a small, sweltering cavern filled with thick, greasy smoke—a cross between a giant’s fireplace and the worst Upchucky Cheez restaurant ever. Above them, housing the spiral slide, was a towering stone chimney with no visible beginning. It was as if they had tumbled down a gargantuan garbage chute. Marlo wiped coffee grounds and moldy cottage-cheese clots off her dress in disgust.
To their left was a plastic cartoonish devil brandishing a large…spork,
by the looks of it. Just above the demon was a creepy sign made of doll parts. Plastic arms and legs spelled out UNWELCOME AREA.
Just beyond the kiddie pool landing pad was a little wooden stage, above which hung a sign that said ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE (AS WELL AS ALL CAMERAS AND ELECTRONIC RECORDING DEVICES). As Milton and Marlo watched, several lizards in gold lamé suits slithered onto the stage. They crawled over busted toy pianos, horns, drums, and guitars and began to plunk, blow, pound, and strum, respectively. Milton rubbed his eyes in disbelief. A longer-than-average lizard sporting Ray-Bans slinked into the spotlight and tapped a tiny microphone.
“Hello? HELLO? Is this thing on? Wow, the sound here is terrible…too much gecko! I kid…A one, two, three, FOUR!”
The band attacked their instruments—twanging, plunking, and bashing out fractured jazz. The lead lizard swung his microphone like a lasso, then brought it to his mouth.
“If you’ve lived a life so bad
that you drove your parents and teachers mad,
one day then, perhaps your last,
you’ll have to pay for every disrupted class.
Deep down beneath your feet where only bad kids go
is a place where it’s always hot weather,
and you learn that a demon’s forever.”
The horn players formed a reptilian conga line. The drummer spun his sticks over his head. One stick flew into the air, hitting Milton in the shin. Without missing a beat the lizard pulled off the tail of the nearest saxophone player and used it to perform an explosive drum solo.
“Yes, you guessed, you’re down in Heck.
Here all the brats are nervous wrecks.
Nothing to do to save their necks.
It’s always detention down in Heck.
Where all the bad kids go…”
The band paused briefly, as if musically leaping off a diving board. Then, with a chaotic splash of sound, the lizards attacked their instruments with reptilian fury.
“Down!!”
The lizards bowed to imaginary applause. Milton, a nice boy even when deceased, started to clap. Marlo elbowed him in the ribs.
Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go Page 1